Gust of Hot Air is a blog outlining my own statistical analysis of Australian Weather. I am Jonathan Lowe, and have completed by Bsc(hons) in statistical analysis as well as my Master of Science. I have done 2 years of my PhD
There is a lot of statistical information regarding climate change and I intend to provide statistical analysis into the area to prove if the recent well advertised rise in temperature is at all statistically significant. Results will be uploaded here on a regular basis

Friday, September 14, 2007

Greens: We're all doomed, unless...you...err....vote for us

The green party of Australia have released a flyer that is sent to households. In it it describes the consequences if you vote liberal or labor at the forthcoming election.

It describes that, given a liberal vote, world wide temperature will rise by at least 3 degrees and a labor vote by at least 2 degrees. This will result in:

- "seas up to 25m higher", yep that's right, we are all going to be under water. 25 meters! wow

- "No snow on the Europe's Alps." Well if there is no snow there, we can assume that there will be no snow anywhere. Say good bye to skiing and the winter olympics

- "30-95% species extinction". Yep you heard correctly, up to 19 in 20 species will become extinct. Maybe humans will be one of them

- "No ice on the poles". Yep the north and south pole will, according to the greens be iceless. So the only place one will be able to view ice is at the local petrol station. No ice, amazing.

- "97% loss of the great barrier reef" Lucky 3% will remain, but I guess it will be 25 meters under water. Which begs the question, how can coral survive being 25 meters under water? I'd like to see how they got the 97% statistic.

- "Greenland melts" And it becomes green again.

- "'Super droughts' across the world" - i guess just like the recent worst drought in 1000 years.

- "Oceans become acidic, destroying sea life" - yep, no more fish. Sea life will die. No more dolphins, whales, fish and those cute octopussies. Get your ocean basket at your local restaurant while you can.

Of course the greens are they key, and a vote for them and none of the above will happen. We'll just be in economical ruin, and therefore will have no money to spend stopping the above.

Interestingly, they say on their leaflet that "That last time the planet was 3 degrees hotter, forests grew in the Antarctic". Hmm, wonder what caused that increase in temperature? Maybe not enough wind farms.

They also say that "the planet has already warmed by at least 0.7 degrees Celsius" - So is it 0.7 degrees or more? Why not state the actual temperature increase?

Such propaganda. It's almost laughable if the voting public were not so gullible.

18 comments:

Wow. So despite the cosmogenic nuclide evidence that the Greenland ice sheet is over 3 million years old, you don't mind it melting and raising global sea levels by 5-8 m because it will make the island green "again". I hope the irony of someone who displays an almost total lack of understanding regarding the earth's climate system writing a blog on climate change is not lost on you. Gullible indeed.

Errr.... and during that 3 million years the earth has seen far greater CO2 levels and temperature swings than even the most fervent Greenhouser could predict for our next hundred years or so. That damn icesheet is tougher than we thought!

OK chemikazi, please list one time during the Pleistocene era when changes in GHG concentrations occurred in as great a magnitude as they have in the last 300 years, then explain why the Greenland ice sheet is disappearing now when it was stable all that time. The way I see it you can appeal to ice and marine cores for CO2 histories, the the CO2 range for the ice age cycle is about 100 ppm. Greenland survived that. Prove me wrong.

well both studies were done only 2 months apart. One saying increasing, one saying decreasing. So unless one proves another wrong, we have inconclusive results here and probably cannot say for sure if greenlands ice sheet is increasing or decreasing.

Fascinating. The GRACE satellites were only launched in 2002 and yet you say the studies (with ERS data between 1992 and 2003) are only two months apart. And one is laser ranging and the other is gravity. You are about 15 years begind the times my friend. Please get up to speed before you start posting ignorant shit here.

Now as it happens the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) waxes for about 3-5 years and wanes for a similar amount yielding a cycle of some 5-8 years at a guess. So Grace data collected and trended over about 3 years ( the Velicogna and Wahr 2005 data)covers only part of one cycle. Indeed, "Velicogna points out that for a long time scientists thought that models would be the way they would figure out what was happening on the ice sheets. “But the models aren’t good enough now to predict the changes we are observing,” she observes. “The physics of the ice sheets aren’t fully understood, and so while those models are good, nature is more complex.”http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Greenland/greenland5.html"Resolving the Discrepancy"

"Progressive warming of the West Spitsbergen Current (WSC) has been observed since 2004. ........ the structure of the WSC and its heat content were modified by the northward advection of large mesoscale eddies observed within the western branch of the WSC in summer 2005. These changes may have large impacts on the Arctic Ocean (AO) climate and ecosystem." Walczowski, Waldemar; Piechura, Jan "Pathways of the Greenland Sea warming". Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 34, No. 10, L10608 30 May 2007

So when the data is accumulated for not only a couple of NAO cycles and whatever other natural cycles and anomolies which affect climate perhaps there will be some scientific validity to any claim made about the Greenland icesheet. Until then, trot out all of the dogma you like, but it has no statistical basis in fact.

Congratulations on discovering the concept of time. The reason why 3 years of Grace is more than sufficient is because gravity is about 2 orders of magnitude more accurate than laser altimetry. You are comparing a line of site transect technique which only receives a signal from ice with 'favourable' geometry with a gravity technique which implicits computes a volume integral of density variations over a Coulomb inverse distance squared swath. Are you saying that 100's of cubic kilometres per year is not statistically significant? Divide it the total volume and you get a fraction of percent. Or is this due to the fantasy swings in CO2 that you say have happened over the last few million years? Really looking forward to seeing that.

Of course it isn't statistically significant. Trend data over part of a cycle with other confounding effects? Try statistics 101 next time.

If you took the time to read the reference even the Grace advocates agree that the actual numbers they generate depend on how they process the data. Lots of confidence in that, not. And I note than none of them address whether there is any cyclical nature to be wary of. I don't doubt these people are good at what they do but their final interpretations are not good science.

It is interesting isn't it. You claim a 1 % natural variability for a 10 year quasi-periodic signal convolved through a century scale response time of the Greenland ice sheet, but somehow believe that the ice sheet made it intact through the Holocene Climatic Optimum. How would that happen? And is the Greenland ice sheet growing or are you still unsure of that? Because if so you weren't saying that before and if not you weren't claiming natural variability for the analytical error. So which one? And how much has your story changed?

Hang on, you were the one who started this blog rolling in support of the very brave contention that the Greenland Ice sheet is melting to the extent it is threatened. So far, the only evidence you have proposed is that a 3 year Grace monitoring study has resulted in a trending loss (mind you they also indicate that the loss is around the edges in places most likely to be affected by ocean currents, whereas in the interior it actually is gaining mass). Furthermore, that data takes no account of any potential natural variation. Indeed, you go so far as to claim without substantiation that the ice sheet has been stable (in this case you must claim that the stability has been better than +/- 100 cubic miles) for 3 million years. Even the European Space Agency is claiming an 11 year periodicity for Greenland ice sheet thickness.

http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMILF638FE_planet_0.html

and they indicate that the NAO is responsible. Your 3 year data is looking pretty sick about now.

Just to put things in perspective, your 100 cubic miles equates to about 0.01%(v) of the ice sheet.

Well, you weren't particularly worried about natural variability when you had managed to convince yourself that Greenland was growing based on some 25 year old satellite data were you? Something about dogma I think was mentioned. Regarding the pattern, aare you aware of Glen's Flow Law? Ice melts at the edges because it has a PARABOLIC PROFILE. Do you understand how atmospheric lapse rates work? Hot low, cold high if you don't. I think your comment regarding thickening in the interior suggests not.

So you are saying that if the Greenland ice sheet is growing the data is OK, otherwise if there is a dataset that proves otherwise it must be due to experimental or analytical error from some unmodeled signal that the researchers didn't think about on DAY ONE of sitting down to examine the data. The reason why you can't expect them to examine natural variability from such an huge response is because it is such a ridiculous notion. You would never get a paper publised saying something that stupid, but hey, be my guess and submit your idea.

And just how are your wild CO2 swings going? Have you compared Vostok and Mauna Kea yet? Bit pathetic isn't it! Or is that NAO too?

All of your self-proclaimed expertise and derrogatory comments regarding others is not worth a bean unless you can actually show us some evidence that the recent short term loss of ice mass is statistically significant, ie. it is not a short term trend that fits within the past history of natural variation of the ice sheet. Either put up or shut up.

PS I certainly didn't claim any long term growth of the ice sheet, you will find that one of the anon contributors passed a comment and reference in that direction.